Abstract

Hifn Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate the IPv4 forwarding throughput and latency of its Hifn 5NP4G Network Processor, a network processor capable of offloading the data plane from host systems in which the component resides. Tests were conducted in February 2002, when the product then was an IBM PowerNP NP4GS3 Network Processor; Hifn acquired the processor from IBM in January 2004 and renamed it the Hifn 5NP4G.

Tests of Hifn’s 5NP4G prove that the network processor offers wire-speed performance in a Packet-over-SONET (PoS) OC-48c environment under all tested configurations. The 5NP4G was capable of forwarding traffic at rates up to and exceeding six million packets per second (Mpps) across both the OC-48c interface and the data-aligned synchronous link (DASL) switch interface in a full-duplex configuration.

The 5NP4G achieved wire-speed results using a 30,000-entry real-world routing table hitting hundreds of routes, a 100,000-entry synthetic routing table with the traffic hitting all routes, and again with the synthetic routing table while concurrently updating entries in the routing table at a rate of 7,300 entries per second. The intention of the concurrent test was to identify the processing headroom still available